THREE MONTHS after Mark left, the City Council of New York decided it wasn’t going to meet until the fall to vote on approval for the South Bronx Area Development Project, affectionately referred to in our office as “SAP,” because it had entailed years of work and would never get built. That is, the City Council had planned it so that it wouldn’t get built. I was in charge of the project and was still a builder of imaginary cities, the way I’d been years ago when I worked as the receptionist and switchboard operator in my father’s office.
One night shortly after the City Council’s vote, I was working late, and my boss, Mr. Wicker, walked into my office and surprised me. It was a warm night and I had taken to working later than the architects. It was almost eight o’clock when Bill Wicker knocked on the wooden molding of my open door. “Anybody home?”
I jumped slightly. My mind wasn’t on work. “Oh, I wanted to finish up as much of this as I can.”
He smiled. “Mind if I come in?” He walked in without waiting for an answer.
I pulled over a chair for him. “You’re never here at this hour,” I said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be, either. You know, you aren’t getting overtime from me. Besides, no one’s going to vote on renovation for a few months now anyway. You can take it easy.”
“I can still finish the report, though, can’t I?”
He waved his hand as if fanning himself. “Oh, sure. Say, would you like to have a drink with me?” Bill Wicker was a civilized, elderly gentleman with daughters my age. Raising all those daughters, he told me once, had taught him patience and understanding. He commuted every day from Westport and never so much as yawned or had a silver hair out of place.
I cleared my throat. “I think I’d like to work. Is that all right?”
He nodded. “No problem. Just thought we could have a little talk. We can talk here, though, can’t we?” He raised his legs, plunked them down hard on my desk, and crossed them. Mr. Wicker ran his hand through his straight hair, then flattened each hair back into place. “I want you to think about taking the summer off.” He sucked in his cheeks. “With pay, of course.”
“I don’t want any time off.”
He nodded. “I’m pretty sure you don’t, but why don’t you take it anyway?”
“Is something wrong with my work?”
He shook his head and looked stunned, as if I’d just said his fly was unzipped. “Cindy told me. And Frank. Well, they said you were down in the dumps over your marriage. You know, you can write that damn proposal anywhere. No need to sit in an office.”
It’s not easy to explain to someone who is offering you three months’ vacation with pay to prepare a report for the City Council at your leisure that you don’t want time off.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’d rather just stay here.”
“Take it,” he said firmly. Then added, a bit more gently, “How can you not want the summer free?”
How can you make someone see that what you want is to get up on schedule, ride and sweat on the subway in heat waves, sit under those fluorescent lights that make you sterile, instead of being on a beach, having fun? I didn’t want fun. I wanted the grind. The routine. What’s more awful to someone who has something to forget than free time?
Mr. Wicker ruffled my hair, then smoothed it down flat as he got up to leave. “Go to Europe. See the world.”
After he left, I sat alone, staring down at New York Harbor, at a lone tug that passed in front of the Statue of Liberty. I thought how strange and foreign the East Coast of America seemed to me, and for the first time in years, I thought seriously about moving home. The East, I’d learned, was not the Midwest. The East never let me forget my humble roots, and I’ve never regretted those roots for a minute. In the end it has been the simple Midwestern clarity that has permitted me to understand some of what has occurred.
The New York Center for Urban Advancement, where I went to work every day, was located near the Battery. The building that housed it was one of a hundred buildings just like it and the corridor I walked down was the same as all the other corridors. And the offices themselves were sterile and undistinguished, not at all like my father’s office. My father’s office was located on the north side of Madison Street, just below the elevated tracks. The “El” churned by, snaking around Chicago’s Loop and dropping grime like bird dung on pedestrians, through a nasty part of the city that looked like the old Chicago of the twenties.
The Chicago Bears had their office in the same building as my father. Often I found myself squashed between sprawling, athletic shoulders and fractured noses. Gangland slayings felt like real possibilities in front of the building where we worked. The Bears were sometimes accompanied by even bigger men, mobsters, my father said. Real thumb-crushers and leg-breakers. Sometimes I had to ride the elevator to our floor when it was loaded down with Chicago Bears, and the elevator trembled under their weight.
But I used to love to play in the drafting room when I was a child. I loved the pencils, the pungent smell of the blueprint machine, the supply closet, all of which represented to me the rational adult world.
There were also pinups thumbtacked to the bulletin board, usually in the form of calendars. They seemed out of place among the tidy desks and carefully drawn plans. As I grew older and the months and years slipped by, the girls in the pictures changed with the times. They grew thinner, their poses less ludicrous, their faces more youthful, as if they attended junior college, until one day a Sierra Club calendar of redwoods appeared and a real woman, myself, Deborah Mills, was working on urban development projects in the drafting room.
Though I never fell in love in my father’s office, Zap did one summer when I ran the switchboard—though I’m not really sure he fell in love so much as sealed his fate. He’d really been in love with Jennie Watson for years, and he was like one of those toys you punch and it keeps coming back. I walked into the drafting room one August evening and in the dim twilight saw my brother, clutching at the breasts of my oldest friend. I saw Jennie’s spine arched over a drafting table. I saw Zap’s hands slide up and down her ribs, and heard him rasp in a deep voice, “Please, please.” I knew what it was then to desire someone desperately and to lose all sense of pride.
That evening I sat in my apartment, staring at the South Bronx project, which was sprawled on the desk along with a small pile of Mark’s unpaid bills that had arrived that day in the mail. I stared at the Bronx battleground where Mark and I had spent Saturdays, envisioning little park benches where there was rubble. The bills were mostly for clothes. Some shirts he’d bought somewhere, shirts I’d never seen. I was trying to figure out if I should pay them or mail him the bills. Or walk over and hand-deliver.
In the end it’s details that defeat us. The bills, not my doomed-to-fail urban planner’s vision for the Bronx, were what I couldn’t handle. It was the same when Mark left. I didn’t cry when I found he was gone. I cried four days later, when I found a wet puppy shivering in the rain. I took the dog by its clutch collar and led it to the address on its tag. I rang the bell, and a tall, heavyset woman in black toreador pants stormed down the stairs, shouting at me. “What’re you doing? Why did you ring that bell?” When she saw my face distort and saw her shivering hound, she began apologizing and even ran after me a little way as I dashed down the street. In the end, it was the dog and his screaming mistress who made me feel lost and destitute in the world, more than Mark and the note he’d left on the kitchen table.
The phone rang as I sat, immobilized by Mark’s unpaid bills.
“Guess who this is?” a woman’s voice said.
“It’s Jennie.” We’d lost track of one another over the years, after she married Tom, but I’d have known her voice anywhere. A few days before, Jennie Watson had received the directory from our high school reunion committee. My address listing was an old one, the first apartment Mark and I had shared in Manhattan, the one next door to the funeral home, where we’d had to push past mourners in order to get inside. Doom, it seemed, surrounded us. Our phone number had changed twice, but my parents’ number was still good, and parents seem to be a kind of constant in the lives of overly transient offspring.
She was crestfallen. It was almost ten years since we’d talked. “How’d you know it was me? Did your mother tell you?”
“We only spent half our lives together on the phone, remember?”
“Oh, God, do I remember. So, how are you?” I told her that my husband had just left me and I thought I was losing my job, but otherwise I was fine.
“Oh, that sounds great,” she said. She was living on a farm in Thrace, New Jersey. I said I didn’t know New Jersey had anything but chemical dumps. She reminded me it was the Garden State and that there were vast farmlands. “We got this one cheap.” I was surprised she said “we.” No one had imagined she and Tom would stay together, but now they had two children. All her sentences had “we” in them. They’d come east long after I had. Tom studied computer science at Columbia while Jennie went to Teachers College for her master’s in biology. They’d planned to return to the Midwest after graduate school, but Tom was offered a well-paying job at Bell Labs and Jennie got a job teaching at Princeton Day.
With the insurance money from his father’s death, Tom made a down payment on a hundred acres of farmland as an investment. “But now he’s addicted. A real farmer. He works four days a week as a farmer. You know Tom.” She laughed. “He always was a workaholic.” I did know Tom and I didn’t recall him ever working very hard. “What about you?” she asked.
“Are you ready for this?” She said she was ready, but when I told her Mark was living with Lila Harris, she was aghast. I told her I wasn’t sure what I minded more. That they were together or that they had never had the nerve to come and just tell me. The conversation turned somber, so I decided to lighten the mood. “My boss has been planning exotic vacations for me. Yesterday he told me to go to Ireland. He thinks I’m Irish.”
She paused for a second. “So you can visit us for a few days,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of room. The kids are with my mother for the summer.” She said it in such a way I understood that that was what I’d do.